4K single tile monitors begin to creep into the market

02 May 2014

By Wesley Fick

The Ultra HD 4K monitor market is awash with choices for gamers, but the most hindering aspect of the UltraHD shift is that many of these monitors use Displayport’s multi-stream transport protocol. To Windows, that makes your single monitor appear as two monitors in portrait mode, which means that you’ll be using Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround to achieve 60Hz gameplay on a single panel. For most people, this isn’t a good way to go about it and introduces some weird anomalies that only occur when gaming on two monitors.

Luckily, monitor manufacturers figured this out long before the first 4K monitors became available on the market and their successors, with a single Displayport stream now capable of running a 4K panel at 60Hz, are much simpler. The first of these are beginning to hit the American and European markets and it’s only a matter of time before they become available here. Hit the jump to find out which one you’ll be saving for.

The first is ASUS’ brand new PB287Q, first unveiled at CES 2014. Its a 28-inch TN panel with a native resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels and it is expected to hit the market at a retail price of US $649 (approx. R6800 as of 5 May 2014). The stand allows for both height and orientation adjustments, which means that you can run it in portrait mode if you wish. There are VESA mounts on the back, touch-enabled buttons on the front and it’ll also scale down to 4K at 30Hz if you’re using HDMI.

Phillips is also launching a new UltraHD 4K monitor. With the entirely uninspiring name of 288P6LJEB, it’s also a 28-inch Ultra HD 4K panel and the stand supports the same kind of movement as the PB287Q. Its also a TN panel, but Phillips’ response time is only quoted as 1ms grey-to-grey. Realistically, this will be closer to 5ms in most conditions. Other niceties added on are stereo speakers, a four-port USB 3.0 hub, DVI-Dual and D-Sub connectors (both limited to 1600p and 1200p respectively), a Displayport 1.2 connector, a MHL connector, a HDMI 1.4a connector (no HDMI 2.0 for this beast) and LED backlighting that isn’t driven through pulse-width modulation, which means less flickering and eyestrain.

Phillips hasn’t detailed the pricing yet, but it should be around or just under the US $700 mark. In practice this will probably retail for about R10,000 when it reaches our shores (and so will the ASUS) but at least things are moving in the right direction and it’s getting more affordable as the months pass. Pretty soon, 4K performance will be the industry’s biggest concern, not 1080p.

Very keen, but how much of a difference would you see on say a 15″/17″ laptop screen between 1080p or 4K? The MSI GS60 comes with a 4K option…

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wesley-Fick/184346154999538 Wesley Fick

The text would be four times smaller because Windows’ DPI scaling still sucks. On a laptop, I can’t see it working out. Apple has the best idea with the 2880 x 1800 Retina display on the Macbook Pro, which essentially turns it into 2x supersampling in all applications without too many graphical glitches.

Mitchell

Give one away NAG?

BinaryMind

I have a 27″ screen and it’s 1080p. It’s perfect. If you had any more pixels in a screen that size, you’d hardly notice it. More pixels in the same size is just a waste. All you really get is worse performance for a similar sized screen SO I’d only get 4k if it was significantly larger (physical size).

That’s my 2 cents

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wesley-Fick/184346154999538 Wesley Fick

However, at 27 inches your 1080p monitor has a significantly lower PPI than my 21.5″ (81.9 to my 102.46). Had you chosen a 27-inch monitor with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (108.79 PPI) you’d end up with a much crisper look, even sitting a further distance away. The closer you sit to your monitor, the more easily you’d notice aliasing and pixel makeup. But because pixel count doesn’t matter to you, it’s not a big deal.

BinaryMind

Yeah, makes sense but I don’t sit close enough for it to matter. With a 27″ screen you usually sit at least a ruler length back so you can see everything. The extra pixels would then make a very small difference in my opinion so you have to weigh up on whether it’s worth it.

On a completely/sort of unrelated note, sorry to ask this here but I can’t make new topics in the forum and I haven’t gotten a reply from the Rage email address:

The size limit for a monitor at Rage is 26″. May you please do me a solid and ask the person in charge of that rule if we can up that to 27″? There are lots of 27″ screens around and it’s only one more inch. I haven’t even heard of a 26″.

Would really appreciate it

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wesley-Fick/184346154999538 Wesley Fick

You’ll have to contact one of the NAG staff to make sure, but I saw plenty of Samsung 120Hz 27″ monitors at the LAN when I was walking around. So long as you stick to your space I don’t think they’ll mind. A bunch of kids had 32-inch TVs with their consoles as well.

Also, there is a rAge sub-forum where you can add to the threads there, the mods won’t ignore you.